Indiscriminate contemplations

Hardware

In an attempt to fix some service issues that I had been experiencing with Comcast, I contacted them on the phone to swap out my cablemodem with a new DOCSIS v.3 model that I had picked up. The rep on the phone insisted that I was paying too much, and proceeded to make changes to my account to fix how much I was paying. Long story short, my cable bill shot up to over $300/month. This fed me up enough to find a way to finally join a growing number of people and “cut the cord”. My issue was that I wanted to find a way to cut the cord, without losing access to the content that my family enjoys. This is where I turned my attention to the SlingTV.

I was in search of a low-cost VoIP provider to use as a home phone replacement, when I thought about Google Voice. The plus side of Google Voice being that all calls are free within the US, making for a fairly cost-effective phone service. The other factor that I needed to account for was that I needed a solution where 911 service functioned correctly. Google Voice alone will not terminate 911 service, so additional service was required.

To test it out I installed FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE AMD64. Install completed flawlessly, so it was time to do some compiling. A vanilla make buildworld: 48 minutes Not bad.. but not amazing either. So I decided to do some threaded compiles to stress the system a little bit. Since it’s an 8 core system, I used the following:

time -h make -j8 buildworld

The resulting time of: 12m 33s was nothing short of impressive. Following up with a: